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Four in 10 Emergency Department Visits Billed to Public Insurance

AHRQ News and Numbers, July 30, 2009

AHRQ News and Numbers provides statistical highlights on the use and cost of health services and health insurance in the United States.

More than 40 percent of the 120 million visits that Americans made to hospital emergency departments in 2006 were billed to public insurance, according to the latest News and Numbers from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

According to the analysis by the Federal agency, about 50 million emergency department visits were billed to Medicaid and Medicare. The uninsured accounted for another 18 percent of visits for emergency care, while 34 percent of the visits were billed to private insurance companies and the rest were billed to workers compensation, military health plan administrator Tricare, and other payers.

The Agency's study of hospital emergency department use in 2006 also found that:

About 38 percent of the 24.2 million visits billed to Medicare ended with the patients being admitted, compared with 11 percent of the 41.5 million visits billed to private insurers, 9.5 percent of the 26 million visits billed to Medicaid, and 7 percent of the 21.2 million visits by the uninsured.

The uninsured were the most frequent users of hospital emergency departments. Their rate was 1.2 times greater than that of people with public or private insurance—452 visits per 1,000 population vs. 367 visits per 1,000 population, respectively.

The uninsured were also the most likely to be treated and released—a possible indication of their use of hospital emergency departments as their usual source of care. Their "treat-and-release" rate was 421 visits per 1,000 population vs. 301 per 1,000 population for the insured.

This AHRQ News and Numbers is based on data in HCUP Statistical Brief #77: Payers of Emergency Department Care, 2006. The report uses statistics from the 2006 Nationwide Emergency Department Sample, a new AHRQ database that is nationally representative of emergency department visits in all non-Federal hospitals. The Nationwide Emergency Department Sample contains 26 million records from emergency department visits from approximately 1,000 community hospitals nationwide. This represents 20 percent of all U.S. hospital emergency departments.

Internet Citation: Four in 10 Emergency Department Visits Billed to Public Insurance: AHRQ News and Numbers, July 30, 2009.
July 2009. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, MD. http://archive.ahrq.gov/news/newsroom/news-and-numbers/073009.html

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